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Trains now on Uber. T's and I'm Stephen and you're listening to the New Statesman

podcast this week we discussed dramatic votes in Parliament the spending review and

you ask us what is going on with the timing of our now inevitable election?

Well at time of recording and time of listening for people who are behind the

N.S. Paywall, the government has gone down to one chastening defeat and all

the indications are isn't by the time than NS Podcast systems who are not behind the

paywall, this and the government will have gone down to a second.

So at the time we're recording it, the government has been defeated on control of the legislative timetable.

Obviously everyone's underlying assumption isn't the majority to take control of the legislative

timetable will endure to seek an extension, which means that we are heading for an election at some point this autumn.

Yes, yes, so the one defeat that we'll be talking about in this podcast is the one where 21 Conservative MPs rebelled and they have been kicked out of the

party so that's probably the most extraordinary thing about what happened that

evening because otherwise Johnson found himself

putting themselves through watching that debate and the vote

will have felt a sort of bit of a sense of deja vu because Boris Johnson

found himself in the same position that Theresa May found herself in three times failing spectacularly to

stave off a anti-No-deal Brexit rebellion.

So the real difference there was that government took a very harsh action against the MPs who rebelled.

And some of them, you know, very significant personalities like Ken Clark and Nicholas Soames.

The thing which I kind of hadn't really realized until I sat down to write the column this week, yeah, at

...